The question of whether a person can actually, truly understand another is one that I think about all my life. Within psychological sciences, it appears that this impossibility is now well established. What a person goes through is to receive signals from another person (e.g., language, behavior, facial expression, vocal sounds, body language) and interpret its meaning to oneself, using his own set of tools, including the memory he associates with the signal and the learned meaning of a concept. For example, Person A eats a lychee fruit, says "ah, sweet," and Person B in her presence can only know what it means by conjuring up his own memory of eating a lychee fruit. If he has never eaten one, he's out of luck. The sensation cannot be directly transmitted from one to the other.
For more abstract feelings, such as happiness and sadness and fear, the same principle applies, even though we tend to imagine that emotions are universally the same in every person and forget the specificity of each occasion and memory. The point is that we understand the external world completely through our internal machinery, and other people is a part of the external world. To date, we have no way of truly "walk in another person's shoes" or living in their skin, despite some science fiction that proposed such possibilities.
Of course, this impossibility to share thoughts and feelings does not stop anyone from trying or believing the illusion that we understand each other. This illusion is rewarding, irresistible, and perhaps absolutely necessary to our emotional health --- I know, the thought is a little disturbing, that our life and sustenance depend on an objective falsehood. What can you do. We can't handle the truth because the truth isn't always good for us.
This is not to say that the self-derived signal-interpretation process is useless. At least we have the ability to evoke our own knowledge, memories, and feelings in an attempt to interpret the signals from another person. And this process is able to facilitate an incomplete but real amount of communication. Heck, we can even simulate other people's emotions to some extent, ie, empathy, drawing on our own emotional reserve. However limited, this is good enough to create interpersonal bonds so strong that we have built massive human civilizations encompassing millions and billions of individuals.
While reading Middlemarch, I was struck again and again by the meticulous description of how people understand and misunderstand each other's thoughts and intentions, how things go awry because each character has his or her own motivation and logic. It's almost a high-definition dissection of the above-mentioned mechanism. To use a cliché, there is no villain in this book. It's not because the author started out with a plan to make every character good or neutral. Rather, she mapped out every character's motivation and then took it down its logical path, which then clashes with another character's logical path. This is the most elevated kind of conflict-making in fiction, and to do it to such a massive extent with so many characters must have been an enormously complex undertaking.
The best example is the drama in Rosamond and Dr. Lydgate's marriage. Initially, my mind was gliding along the well-tread path of how a beautiful but immature or stupid young woman who causes the disillusion of her man, recalling Louisa Musgrove's relationship with Captain Wentworth ("Persuasion"). The more it went on, however, the harder I began to laugh at the one-upmanship between Rosamond and Tertius. Rosamond may be young and naïve and a bit of a ditz, but stupid she is not. Despite Lydgate's repeated yelling and threats, pulling his hair out, she goes off and thwarts him every single time. Each is stubbornly committed to their own way of coping with the debt situation, to which both had contributed. Hilarity ensues. Marriage hardly improves one's ability to read another's mind, Eliot seems to say, good luck with trying to change one another.
No kidding. Who hasn't gone through the futility of trying to change one's spouse, so that two think as one? But what appears to be marital harmony due to a mind convergence is but an illusion. What really happens in a seemingly harmonious marriage is illustrated in the Garth family, in which Mrs. Garth grumbles, either inwardly or outwardly, but sighs and lets Mr. Garth go off to do his own thing. If we can't make peace with our fundamental differences ... then we are just banging our heads on the wall until they explode into bloody pulp. Oh well.
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